Santana Tour Report #30

Tampa: thought: what is worse than any economic gap is the culture gap.

By morning the rain has stopped, the wind has died down, and the sun peaks from behind clouds. Today’s show is in the Tampa Sundome, a huge, cavernous, echoey building – but filled with a nice audience. we get a standing ovation at the end of our set. the duets with Santana sound great… afterwards we drive to Orlando and find a little pub near a strange Disneyland-like area that appears relatively new, but was built to look old… instahistory… pretty awful, actually… history is messy, one house is built on the ruins of another, not all neat like this… organic growth is never neat… and i mean neat in that clean, Mall-culture Disney sort of way… at least my guys had some good black and tan in the pub and Carl begged until the bartender gave him a free glas of milk for his cereal – ’cause Carl has to eat every couple of hours…

Santana Tour Report #29

Tampa, Florida: it’s still raining when i wake up… a hurricane is approaching from the Gulf of Mexico and might strike Tampa sometime tonight or tomorrow… the elevators at the Holiday Inn aren’t working and Jon had to walk down 11 flights of stairs this morning… hm, did i mention there is no air-conditioning in the hotel restaurant or the lobby? how about that the a/c in the room is really, really loud… or that the coffee is really, really bad?

Santana Tour Report #28

we leave Houston shortly after 9pm on Saturday evening and arrive in Tampa at 5pm on Sunday afternoon… a very long submarine ride… i finally finish Ken Wilber’s book “A Brief History of Everything” – what a brilliant book…

Carl buys beer holders for everybody at a Texas truckstop… and it rains all the way from Texas to Florida and is still raining now…B ondo, Jon and i take a cab to Hyde Park in Tampa for dinner…

Santana Tour Report #27

Houston: it’s raining when i leave the bus @ 8am looking for this venue’s catering and coffee… but the coffee is terrible and i choose Twining’s Earl Grey tea instead… i hear that last night’s show in San Antonio was almost shut down… 5 policemen and a couple of councilmen threatened Santana’s soundman Bruce to turn down the music or have the concert shut down…

hm, 5 cops against 5,000 fans, many of which had visited the Beer tents frequently … in fact, there were lots of guys wearing yellow t-shirts that said “BEER” who delivered beer to all the fans in the stands… that would have been a very realistic fight!!… but, in the end, the sound was turned down and then one angry member of the audience, unhappy with the lack of volume, poured a whole big-gulp of beer into Santana’s mixing console… as a result the drums went silent until they were patched into our mixing board a few minutes later…

hm, the politics of Rock + Roll… seems to me that politicians should stay out of the concerts once they have been approved… we all know that Rock + Roll is loud… if you don’t want the concert, don’t rent the venue to a promoter for a rock band… but don’t allow the concert and then threaten the soundman and almost incite a riot… pretty dumb if ya ask me…

so – it rains all day in Houston, and the humidity is unbelievably high, but we play well, especially considering that the fingers stick to the strings in this humidity and drumsticks somehow want to fly away… one of Carl’s sticks accidentaly flies high into the air and comes straight back down into his hand…

Santana Tour Report #26

San Antonio: i wake up at 4am and can’t go back to sleep… from 5 to 7am i go online and read various news items…

a vulcano is erupting under a huge glacier in Iceland… international airtraffic has to be rerouted because a cloud of steam rises up 3 miles in the air… a big flood is expected…

i can finally fall asleep around 8am… another show in Sunken Gardens tonight, then off to Houston…